Live Right Now

"Join the Movement - Live Right Now" preach the t-shirts of the staff of the Young Men's Christian Association (you probably know it as the YMCA). The congregation, gathered not on wooden pews but on ellipticals, squash courts, treadmills, free-weights, and BOSU balls, echoes back the gym equivalent of an 'Amen' -- "argh grunt."
Having recently joined this sweaty subculture, I understand the attraction to the message - "Live Right Now" - but I have to say, it is all in how you punctuate it.  "Live right, now" I fully affirm while "live right-now" would need some interpretation before I chimed in an 'amen' - gutteral grunt or otherwise.
"Live right, now" seems to have its emphasis on living right, on taking care of our bodies, on not living wrongly.  The exhortation encourages us to look at everything from sleep patterns, to eating habits, to excercise - and that's just on the physical level.  It's not an interpretive stretch to find application relationally, professionally, psychologically, and in ways not already immediately apparent, spiritually.  This is the same impulse parents are responding to when they sign up their children for soccer, swimming lessons, hockey, dance and Karate.  This is the same driving force behind the work of Activity Coordinators at places like Golden Years and Riverbend.   This is the same message the apostle Paul encourages Christians to adhere to when he reminds that their bodies are temples of God's Holy Spirit.  This is the same impulse I find myself having been created with, an impulse I often argue with, but thankfully one I have been able to cooperate with as of late.  Now, I am living right.
But there is another way of punctuating this brief beseeching - "Live, right-now" that may be at play in some of the YMCA Congregants minds.  The idea being that if you are going to bother living, you had better do it right now because this is the only shot you got.  "Live, right-now" can only be fully embraced in a place that is cut off from the possibility of an after-life, like those folks who stepped into 'Biosphere 2' in Arizona a few years back were cut off from life outside the dome.  This refrain of 'live, right-now' wouldn't have me singing, or if I did, I'd certainly be off-key, assuming it to a more somber minor key than the triumphalism of some of the immediate achievers around me.
The way that Philip Yancey discusses this in his "Finding God in Unexpected Places" resonates with me and makes me wonder if he was on the treadmill beside mine: "It is hard for us to live in awareness of death; it may be even harder for us to live in awareness of afterlife.  We hope for recreated bodies while inhabiting aged and failing ones." and then, reminding us of Paul's words, "Though outwardly we are wasting away [despite all attempts at the Chicago Health Club to reverse entropy] yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day."
In the areopagus, Paul connected with the Epicureans and Stoics by quoting their philosophers.  Today, at the 'Y', I'm guessing that he'd have something to say about the t-shirts of the staff.   And then, I am guessing Paul would have had something inviting to say to the gym-rats, as he urged them outside their dome, echoing Christ, to "join the movement."